22 - Jews and Poles under Soviet Occupation (1939-1941): Conflicting Interests

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The attitude of a considerable number of Jews to Soviet power between 17 September 1939 and 21 June 1941 in the Polish territories annexed by the USSR has still not been adequately studied and the issue causes mutual resentment. One of the most commonly accepted points of view charges the Jews’ with betraying the Polish state and ‘collaborating’ with the enemy, on the basis of the favourable welcome they gave the Soviet troops, for example, or the prominent position they held in the new administration.

What is important, in the framework of the Jewish perception of twentieth-century Polish national history, is to establish whether available sources confirm the ‘collaboration’ of Polish Jews with the Soviet invader as an actual fact and, if so, how to characterize it, and to understand what place it occupies in Polish history.

Curiously enough the accusation of collaboration is rare in Polish historical works published in the West. It appeared for the first time at the outbreak of war in reports on the situation in occupied Poland drawn up by the delegates of the government in London. These reports are a sort of synthesis in which underground observers mix on-the-spot information with their own political analyses. They note Jewish collaboration with the ‘reds’ but rarely supply precise facts, probably because of the difficulties in collecting them, presenting them, and conveying information from inside the area of Soviet occupation to the outside world. These observers were by no means independent investigators and they were also expressing the varying sympathies of the Polish government.

One of the earliest reports was written by Jan Karski, key witness in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. Karski's evidence is interesting on more than one count. First, he was the first courier to go to the Soviet zone at the end of 1939 and, as early as February 1940, to be able personally to inform the Polish government in exile, still at Angers, of the facts of the German and Soviet occupations. Secondly, although his report on the Soviet occupation is relatively vague compared with information which got through later, it expresses, in our view, the real complexity of the situation: a complexity based on the ‘dialectic’ of the two occupations. Karski was neither a typical witness nor hostile to the Jews, as his unique evidence on the Warsaw ghetto shows.